Teknosophy

Hi folks!
Two postings in one week, oh my! I'm on fire eh?

First off, I'd like to say thanks to all my readers - thanks to you (and my awesome writing abilities) I'm going to be featured on The Printed Blog!

Next, I've got a confession to make. Many of you know that in 2006 I started down a long and bumpy road that I called Magnanimous. It was supposed to be my next startup, my next obsession, and the tech world's "Next Big Thing." Magnanimous proposed to deliver the best of the Internet - movies, music, photos, podcasts, and even television channels, to your television, without those pesky Microsoft and Adobe "Update Enforcers" raining on your parade. Well, things went awry and I had to put it on the back burner. (It was for the better - I wasn't quite ready for its implications and requirements.) But it never ceased to be my obsession...

So, armed with the knowledge of where the Internet TV market is headed and what it's doing right & wrong, I give to you... The Executive Summary from my newest business plan... Project Phoenix.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to be counted in on the mailing list!

-=applause=-


Executive Summary

I still can't believe it. It's been several years since the advent of Internet-based video, and we're still watching it at our computers. The TV, computer, music, and movie industries are at the cusp of something, and nobody's got any answers. We've got great big HD screens, connected to $100-per-month cable boxes, yet we crowd around the 15” computer screen in the den when we want to share our photo collection or YouTube favorites.

The closest anyone's come to Internet-based media in the living room is a PC with a keyboard and mouse rigged up to the television. A few attempts have been made to capture it in an appliance, but feature-limited, closed-platform devices have been the only result.

Sprint, AT&T and the like advertise devices that allow you to enjoy Facebook, email, music, and more in the palm of your hand. That still leaves something to be desired in the living room.

Enter Project Phoenix. Originally conceived in 2006 when I foresaw a demand for a living room media appliance, it's even more relevant now that a large portion of media content has moved to the Internet. A combination of sleek hardware, powerful software, and an organic business model are going to make this thing a hit.

Connect it to your Internet connection and any television. Your content is now unchained. Unchained from the Cloud, from DRM, and from your 15” laptop screen. Enjoy.

Author's note: Sorry I haven't been writing much lately, folks. I've been ultrabusy in my personal life - but now that I have some time again, I've realized something. No matter what I do during the day and no matter how much (or little) money I make, I don't feel like myself unless I write. So expect a lot more articles out of me this Fall...

Now, back to Why the Cloud Sucks!

Online Storage

When you think of "The Cloud," you think of "cloud storage" - Internet-based hard drives (such as Xdrive, Sharepoint, even flickr) where you can store things on "someone else's computer." The benefit is, you don't technically have to back your photos up (they're backed up by the staff at the website), and you can access that media from just about any computer. The down side is, "someone else" technically posesses your documents - most of the time there'll be privacy pledges AND/OR rights ownership stipulations (who owns the photos I upload to flickr or Facebook?). Your best bet is always to back up your stuff to your OWN backup hard drive, and if you care about who owns your work (all you aspiring photographers out there), spend a few hours perusing those End User License Agreements before you click "Yeah whatever I agree!"

It's one thing to lose all your music (see Part I), but your personal work and photos are exponentially more important...

EMAIL

When one of my clients had his Gmail account hacked this week, it made me realize my job in the next 10 years will be a bit less Windows-virus-rescue related and more I-Can't-Get-Into-My-Cloud-Account related. At first I didn't really know what to tell him. Are you using Firefox as opposed to Internet Explorer? Good. Okay uhh... So I looked into the link above (click on the word "hacked") and learned a lot. A lot of it is pretty straightforward - If your Gmail account is hacked and you click "Can't access your account", they're going to want to see some proof that you're the real Slim Shady. Know when you opened your Gmail (and other Google) account, the names of 3 frequently-contacted contacts, and the names of 3 message labels (ones you created to categorize your mail, such as Relatives, Work, or eBay Receipts). Knowing the contents of some of the messages isn't a bad idea either.

In order to prevent hacking in the first place, change your password once in a while, and don't use the same password for everything in the rare case that your account at joeblowshouseofflyfishing.com is compromised. Finally, NEVER use Internet Explorer (it's the devil) and if at all possible, don't use Windows.

Now, imagine your power or water service being cut off during an emergency. When service is restored, it's the same power or water you're used to. However, having a Cloud account hacked (such as a gmail, facebook, flickr, etc.) is more like getting your address book and family photos robbed from your house. Even if access to your account is restored, sometimes you don't get your stuff back! So again, back those important files up on a backup drive. If you don't know what you need or how to get one, I'll sell you one.

POP vs IMAP

One thing I'll agree with Cloud-heads on is email. Your email should be stored online in an email address, as opposed to downloaded to your computer. Here's how it works:

POP3 email addresses (unfortunately, most Road Runner, Frontier, and other email accounts provided by the local utilities) are email accounts that download any new messages to your computer. Messages are viewed in a Mail Client, such as MS Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird. (NEVER EVER EVER use Outlook Express - it lets viruses raid your address book for their next victims, and makes your computer a great candidate for Spam Zombiehood.) Emails are stored ONLY in your computer and you're ONLY allowed to check your email from that ONE COMPUTER, pretty much forever. You can't check your email from another computer, such as your vacation laptop. If you do spend the 10 minutes configuring that secondary computer, any new messages that are downloaded to it are only available there. Furthermore, if one of the computers starts on fire/drowns in a flood/otherwise explodes, all those emails are gone (unless you back them up, which is not very easy).

This is the cheap and flimsy way to offer email service.

The more sophisticated and clean way to do email is through a technology known as IMAP. IMAP stores all your emails on a central server. You can still use a client such as Outlook or Thunderbird (OR a smartphone!) to view those emails, but nothing is stored on your computer - if that computer blows up, no big deal! Your stuff's tucked safely away on a mail server. (Back up all those photo attachments of the grandkids, of course.) Want to view your email on the travel laptop as well as the home desktop? Set up your client to point to the IMAP server and everything should synchronize perfectly, including records of any emails you've sent!!! (Some companies and schools may give you an Exchange email address - this is Microsoft's version of IMAP and it's somewhat usable - it follows the same principles as IMAP, plus it gives you a fancy Webmail app for when you're at an Internet cafe and want to check in.)

Again, most utility companies provide POP3 email addresses for people - the only way these are usable is by using them in a Webmail fashion - in other words, going to "webmail.examplecompany.com" or whatever the address is, and leaving your emails on their server. You can access these emails from any Web browser on any computer or smartphone in the solar system! You can still download and upload attachments as well.

An alternative to either of these is just to sign up for a Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or Gmail account - this way even if you do move out of town or change Internet providers for any reason, you don't have to get a whole new email address. Gmail goes one step further and offers you a choice of POP3 or IMAP email service in case you're more comfortable working with an email client program as opposed to a Web page.

Online Apps

Back in the late 1990s, I remember my Uncle telling me that the future of computing is online, and beyond that, the future of applications is there too. That was a lot of foresight to have back then, and only now is the latter part of his statement coming true. What do I mean? Well, back in the 80s, most everything you did on your computer stayed on your computer. Sure, you printed or transferred things to a floppy once in a while, but for the most part it was a nice quiet ascetic life for your Compy.

Then one day, AOL, Prodigy and the Internet came along. You were still creating documents on your MS Office software, editing photos in Photoshop, and playing DOS games, but you were exchanging these documents, photos, and games with friends. Fun, wasn't it?

The late 2000s brought about the first of the Web apps. These are programs you don't have to install on your computer - simply go to a Web site and start using them! Some of them (such as the Flash-based Pandora) are truly amazing. Others are good ideas in theory only (Google Docs), and still others (BMC Remedy) miss the point entirely and offer all the disadvantages of the Cloud with little to no advantage.

Pandora is basically an application that allows you to create your own customizable personal radio stations - you don't download any music, but you type in a few of your favorite tunes and it searches for bands and songs that sound similar, then plays them for you ad infinitum. GREAT way to discover new music or keep a party going.

Meanwhile, MS Office 2007 gets even more confusing (that new Ribbon layout added to justify the cost of the upgrade, as far as I can tell) and bloated (Office Groove slows your computer down significantly. Can someone tell me what it does?). So if you don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for that, and you're not savvy enough to have heard of OpenOffice, there's a solution. This solution is Google Docs - This is the Web-obsessed Google's free-of-charge take on office software. Simply go to docs.google.com and select from Word Processing, Spreadsheets, etc. You can save it to your Google (cloud) account, email it to friends as an attachment, or download it to your computer for safekeeping (highly recommended if it's something important).

For collaboration, Google Docs is pretty much the only way to fly. Get this: You can grant your friends access to any of the Docs stored in your Google account! The possibilities here are endless. Let's say you're working on a document and want your friends to proofread and correct it as soon as possible. Grant them access. Let's say you want all your roommates to be able to maintain a shopping list together. Done. Planning a vacation with your sweetheart? Both of you can add excursion ideas for the other to analyze. All authorized collaborators on the fly, 24/7, and the document is updated immediately. Go ahead, try it out now!

There are two drawbacks I can think of to using Google Docs - first is the "build quality" - I've experienced a ton of bugs when using it - one example common to Web-app word processors is the random thrusting of the cursor to the very top of the document while typing. Secondly, Google's magnanimity makes me wonder - what are they getting out of this? Are they just trying to see if they can put Microsoft out of business? If it's just that, or maybe the ability to scan your documents for key Ad words while maintaining your anonymity, then that's cool with me. (Then again, putting two and two together to crack anonymity isn't difficult for the crafty among us.)

BMC, which is SaaS (Software as a Service, in other words a subscription to a Web app), seems to miss the point entirely. For a fee, they'll allow your employees to log in to their website and use their industry-leading Remedy(tm) work order management software. That's all well and good, until you recall the fact that current first-generation Web apps are all be rather simple - no 3D flight simulators anytime soon. Worse yet, my personal experience with BMC has been nothing but daily outages and poor collaboration among their programmers - one aspect of the software functions entirely differently from the rest. So, why should we pay you to host a tiny little program that we can slap on to our own server? Well no reason, unless of course we're the type people who lease automobiles...

So, while these Web Apps can be free and/or fun, they have their cons. Their features change all the time - so you have even LESS control and familiarity over the application than you do over the update-happy ones installed on your computer. Then you have the build quality issues, which may subside once better Web-programming languages and methods are devised. Finally, and obviously, there's no way to access them while offline (such as in an airport or high-end hotel, at $10 per day!). So if you're going to be on a 10-hour flight through the clouds, make sure that novel you're typing is located on your laptop, not somewhere in eh... the... Cloud.

Stay tuned for more Teknosophy soon!!! Thanks for reading and please share with your friends!

Note: If you ever see underlined hyperlinks in my articles, it's not from one of those evil article-ad companies. It's a link to an article I suggest you read based on whatever subject matter is underlined...

Welcome to the Cloud
While the dawn of platform-independent, Internet-based, Cloud-worshipping voodoo means the end of Microsoft, it brings with it a different set of challenges than the Bluescreens and spyware we're used to.

What is the Cloud? Well, people realized that depending on ONE computer in your life isn't such a good idea. Seeing as most people have unreliable computers, don't back up their damn documents, and need to have all of their documents/media in front of them at all times (at home, at work, on their phones), depending on one stationary computer makes less and less sense. Enter the Cloud (named for the way the Internet is represented on diagrams). As predicted by Bill Gates in 1994, all of your documents and media will soon be stored outside of your computer - be it your videos on YouTube, your photos on Facebook, your emails on Gmail (Google's mostly-brilliant free email service), AND, accessible from many computers, handheld devices, and Internet appliances.

Many Catches
Let's recap: Storage services, social networking, and even online word processing software, all free? C'mon, folks, you know better. There's always a catch. As with other free services, there will be advertisements, such as banner ads. The next generation of ads harnesses your user input to feed you "Targeted Ads" - sites like Facebook show you ads based on your location, age, interests, and such. Gmail, however, targets you based on what it finds in the content of your emails! Yes, write someone an email that has the word "invention" in it, and you'll get nice little text-banner ads offering to help you develop a patent. Cool? Yes. Disturbing? A little. Now, Gmail claims that no human will ever read your emails, and that they're scanned anonymously for the sole purpose of making advertising more relevant and thus more efficient for all parties involved. That's fine, and it's no reason to panic just yet, but Teknosophy is all about making the beginners aware of the technology.

So, while everyone's writing articles praising the advent of the Cloud, I'm already predicting some problems. Guess what, ads are just the tip of the iceberg. Like anything, Cloud Computing has flaws, and today we're going to explore them in this series. Let's start our discussion with the DRM aspect.

DRM
Apple may be the next giant to fall. Not in the short run, obviously, but in the long run. The predictor? A simple linchpin known as the Apple ID. Your Apple ID consists of your email address and a password, and it enables you to purchase music, music videos, movies, and iPhone/iPod Apps (Apps = applications/programs) from the iTunes Music Store. Stored within your account are things like your credit card number and your purchase history.

Well, what's wrong with that, Marc? Everyone's doing it! You're just a conspiracy theorist!

The Backstory
I didn't pay much attention to my Apple ID until this week. I went to add a new eBay App to my iPod, and it said, "Sorry, your account doesn't exist! You can't download anything!" What? Even clicking "I forgot my username/password" resulted in Apple denying my existence. Then it hit me - I've been a member of the iTunes Music Store ever since it opened, and I have purchased hundreds of songs from them. You know, those little songs that you remember from the 80s, the songs that get stuck in your head, the songs you paid $1 each for.

Apple automated system: Hi, I'm the Apple Automated System! Simply say what you need and I'll give you the right information!
Me: iTunes Account
Apple AS: Did you say, iPod Technical Support?
Me: Account!
Apple AS: Did you say, iPod Technical Support?
Me: F%$#$ you!
Apple AS: I'm terribly sorry you're dissatisfied! Let me get you to an operator. Please hold!

Many other misunderstandings, callbacks, and "go to our website"s later... they were able to recover my account. Come to find out, it was hacked by a Nigerian-style scammer. But that's not the point...

My Point
What Apple in its self-aggrandizing advertisements fails to tell you is that while it simplifies, unifies, purifies, and sanctifies everything in your life, it also HAS A CHOKEHOLD on the aforementioned everything in your life. Without your Apple ID, password, and an Internet connection, all of that purchased media content is USELESS. Yep. All those wonderful HD movies, all those tunes, all those handy little Apps. The reason is DRM - Digital Rights Management: In an Obamanomic attempt to prevent piracy, many online stores require you to ASK AND periodically RE-ASK THEIR PERMISSION to use your purchased media. On top of that, you're ONLY allowed to play your music on a limited number of authorized devices, usually within one brand family. (While the music industry has eased its DRM requirements thanks to a manifesto Steve Jobs wrote in 2007, ironically it's his Apple that uses DRM enforcement on all the Apps it sells.)

Apple has always been the underdog. At their inception they were out to get "the big guys," flying a pirate flag at their corporate headquarters (SO AWESOME). Now that they've "won" so to speak, I really hope they don't let the success go to their heads. Their whole crusade was better FUNDAMENTAL product design (operating systems). Will someone come along and show them up someday? Probably.

So, Apple, if you're listening, thank you for re-allowing me to use items I've purchased. Imagine if you had to ask Upper Deck for permission to look at or sell your valuable baseball Rookie cards. WORSE YET, imagine your car calling home to the factory of endangered GM or Chrysler before it's allowed to start in the morning? You of all people should know not to be so controlling. Think of that pirate flag, or better yet, think about all the companies you're putting out of business thanks to products that respect the user.

Mobile Apps
In the old days (that's the 1990s for me), phones and PDAs didn't go on the Internet. If you wanted to add functionality to your Palm Pilot or Windows CE device, you went to the software author's website, or purchased an install CD, then "synced" your handheld device up to your computer to install. Nowadays, BlackBerries, iPod Touches, iPhones (and eventually most computers), will download programs from an App Store. It's an easy, one-click installation that doesn't require a computer-to-handheld-device synchronization, and thanks to wireless and cellular Internet, can be done 'most anywhere in the world. So what's the problem? In the case of Apple and many major App Stores, two things. First, all the programs are riddled with DRM, and second, they're all account-dependent. Lose that password and lose your everything.

A Solution
Ubuntu's Software Center program is the best of both worlds. Not only are most items free (both $0 and free of DRM), but, gasp! It's NOT THE ONLY source of applications you can use on Ubuntu-based computers. On top of that, an advanced mode allows you to add other sources to the list of downloadable Apps (such as from Ubuntu's partners, or third-party developers). You can also download individual "package files" to your heart's content from Web sites and such and they'll all work just fine. So while you have the ease of use and searchability of an "App Store," you still retain your freedom. No Jobsian restrictions on what can and cannot be offered on the platform.

Tip of the Iceberg
Stay tuned folks for the next edition of Why the Cloud Sucks. We're going to be talking about Cloud Storage, Web Apps, Centralized Media, and more!

Check this out!

http://www.whec.com/news/stories/S1524757.shtml?cat=565

McAfee finally exposed for what it is: Garbage. The article (from my local TV station WHEC) says that while McAfee's Antivirus program is supposed to protect your Windows box from intruders, it was naughty itself. It caused computers the world over to reboot incessantly... Why? Because it mistakenly identified a Windows system file as a virus.

Two points here, folks:

1: It was kinda right! Viruses by definition are harmful pieces of software that interrupt your computing experience and cause some harm. Windows fits that description! Think about that paradox, eh? If McAfee were really being honest with itself, it would tag ITSELF as a virus and remove itself while it's at it. It's a hog of a program that slows your computer down by half and bugs you for updates all the time.

2: Even for experts like me, this would be a nightmare. Imagine not knowing why your computer is rebooting incessantly. Once you figured it out, you can't even get back into Windows (unless you work some black magic!) to run the McAfee update to get rid of the glitch! I feel QUITE SORRY for all the people out there using this horrid software who have NO IDEA what to do or why their computer ceased to function. At least the "schools, hospitals, and businesses" the article mentions have IT support staff. Imagine all those people at home!

So, if your home or small business computer is rebooting incessantly, you know who to call. I'll get that McAfee garbage off your computer for good!

So I bought the teknosophy.com domain from my boss. Then I installed Joomla. Then I planned on importing all my old articles into it. I didn't get time to do it for months, and here I am, sitting at Starbucks, finally ready to update Joomla to the latest version and import all my articles when... pof! A giant nightmare, filled with help manuals that talk down to and over your head at the same time...

2 hours later, I decided it needed to go.

Joomla sucked. Arguably sucked more than WordPress. Both claim to be easy and magical... but only if you're one of those nocturnal chain-smoking web developer types... Goodbye Joomla, goodbye 2 hours wasted of my life trying to do migrations, installs, migration component installs, and other useless impossible functions WHEN ALL I WANTED WAS A FREAKING BLOG!!!

My mom always says I can fall into a pile of crap and come out smelling like a rose. Here I've done it again. Serendipitously, I stumbled upon Serendipity, and boy is it simple. Simple install, simple 1-click engine updates, and so far extremely simple entry creation. No fuss, no muss, no mess. Thanks, Serendipity. I'll be sure to sing your praises to many people.

Stay tuned for the re-posting of all my old articles...